Standards for the WLAN technology have been developed as Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 standards. IEEE 802.11a and b use an unlicensed band at 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz. IEEE 802.11b provides a transmission rate of 11 Mbps and IEEE 802.11a provides a transmission rate of 54 Mbps. IEEE 802.11g provides a transmission rate of 54 Mbps by applying Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) at 2.4 GHz. IEEE 802.11n provides a transmission rate of 300 Mbps for four spatial streams by applying Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO)-OFDM. IEEE 802.11n supports a channel bandwidth of up to 40 MHz and, in this case, provides a transmission rate of 600 Mbps.
The above-described WLAN standards have evolved into IEEE 802.11ac that uses a bandwidth of up to 160 MHz and supports a transmission rate of up to 1 Gbits/s for 8 spatial streams and IEEE 802.1 lax standards are under discussion.
Meanwhile, IEEE 802.11ad defines performance enhancement for high-speed throughput in the 60 GHz band, and IEEE 802.11ay, for introducing channel aggregation (or bonding) and MIMO technology to IEEE 802.11ad systems for the first time, is being discussed.